Reduce Travel with Online Collaboration

This is our last week in our TeleGreen Your Work travel reduction campaign so if you haven't done so already, we hope that you’ll have a look at our 10 technology tips to help you reduce your need to travel, and try out some of the travel reduction tools we've collected. In this blog post I'll cover ways you can increase online collaboration to reduce travel and work efficiently.

Online collaboration is one of these generic terms that seems to lose meaning the more people use it. From a GreenTech perspective, we mean something specific: a succession of online sessions over time that allow people to communicate and work together on long-term or shared projects, often by developing common work-plans, documents, presentations, meeting notes, and other work products that all participants can use whenever and wherever they want.

The environmental impact of working collaboratively online is to reduce travel. For example, for every short-haul round trip on an airplane (for example, New York to Chicago or Frankfurt to London) you don't take, you'll save the environment around one half of a metric ton of CO2. That's equivalent to 6% of the CO2 emitted from the electricity use of an average home per year. That doesn't include the hassle and expense of getting to and from the airports, getting through the airports, hotel expenses, and parking, for example.

The easiest way to see what online collaboration is all about is to check out some of the new, free cloud computing services that are out there. Cloud computing is an emerging buzz-word, which basically means services you use over the Internet like Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, Live Documents, or One Hub rather than installing software and housing the document or information in-house. All of the tools mentioned above allow you to do things like store and share documents, calendars, project management schedules, and presentations online at no cost. This software-as-a-service model of computing has the added environmental and budgetary benefit of needing a less robust computer system, servers, and installed software to host these applications.

See a good deal more about the new cloud computing online services and other ways of working collaboratively in the TechSoup article: A Few Good Tools for Sharing Files with Distributed Groups.

Some additional articles we have on this topic include:

• Eight Tools to Keep Your Team Connected
• Collaboration Tools Chart
• And be sure and check out the great online video, Google Docs in Plain English

Check out these TechSoup forum discussion threads about using online collaboration tools:

• Checkvist (Cool Online Checklist Collaboration Tool)
• Can tech help ease volunteers' pocketbook shock with gas prices?
• Microsoft Communicator
• More conversations in our Virtual Community Forum

If you want added features and the added security of not having your collaborative work online and hosted by Google or Yahoo!, TechSoup Stock has some useful software tools like Microsoft Office Communicator. This software is essentially an extension of Microsoft Office. It has an array of features, which include instant messaging, phone conferencing, desktop sharing, and video conferencing. The real advantage of using MS Communicator is that you can see who is on your computer network and you can get a hold of them in a variety of ways. The TechSoup Stock admin fee for nonprofts and libraries is $40.00 plus $2 per user license. Check out my recent blog post: Tools for Meetings Without Needing To Travel: Microsoft Communicator to learn more.

Other donated or discounted online collaboration products available TechSoup Stock include:

Microsoft Groove Server 2007: this strangely named application is classic online collaboration software that uses the Internet to allow team members, regardless of location, to share files, participate in online discussions or chats, plan meetings, and record team meetings. It also has a calendar tool to build a shared project schedule and track important project dates and milestones. It is currently available for nonprofits and libraries at an admin fee of $265 plus $9 per user license.

Wikispaces: Wikis are a new type of Web site that allows multiple people to add or modify content. The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia. Wikispaces is a wiki-hosting service that allows you to create a collaborative Web site that is easy to setup and use. You choose who has access to create or modify content, and because each version of a page on Wikispaces is saved, users can compare versions or go back to a previous version for reference. The TechSoup Stock nonprofit and library admin fee for a Wikispaces subscription is $10 per year.

Basecamp: Basecamp is a Web-based project collaboration tool that shares files, sets deadlines, assign tasks, centralizes feedback, does email alerts to members etc. As far as I know, they do not have nonprofit discounts, but it is widely used in the nonprofit/NGO sector. The basic plan is $24 per month.

Whether you have a home-based office or multiple offices around the world, online collaboration can help make your project teams more productive in addition to reducing your travel carbon footprint.

We fervently hope that you try out some of these online collaboration tools and techniques, and cordially invite you to take our quick survey about the TeleGreening campaign overall so you can tell us what you've found useful, and what you found less than useful.